Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future

Apple releases Final Cut Pro X with consumer-friendly pricing

Apple has released Final Cut Pro X today, its flagship video-editing software application for Mac OS X. As a £179 purchase exclusively download-only from the Mac App Store, it's another example of Apple taking its professional software and using its download platforms to make it more accessible to semi-pro enthusiasts and adventurous consumers.

Final Cut Pro X was announced back in April, and was met with a lot of excitement in the professional editing world. The 64-bit application has been redesigned to take advantage of recent hardware and software improvements on the Mac, such as GPU-utilisation to offload rendering tasks from the CPU to dedicated graphics hardware.

ADVERTISEMENT

It also uses a new timeline system called the "Magnetic Timeline". It's a little difficult to explain in words alone, but in essence this is a posh term for quite a simple UI improvement that allows you to compress and expand a multi-track edit without losing sight of short clips that may become hidden by larger ones.

You can see a video of the timeline in action on Apple's website to get a better idea of what this looks like.

READ NEXT

Cisco set to buy AppDynamics for a staggering $3.7 billion

ByVictoria Woollaston

Another new feature is a media analysis tool. This will scan your imported videos and sort them in your library based on their content. For example, you can browse clips that only feature two people in them, or perhaps just close-up shots of a single person that may also need some image stabilisation processing. This is stored as metadata and is generated automatically, but you can add custom tags and notes to certain frames or regions of your clips too, and create folders to collate them for future reference. There are a number of other major new features perhaps relevant only to professional editors, such as 4K-resolution editing.

But most interesting to us is that as a result of Final Cut Pro X's price (£179), the suite costs several hundred pounds less than the old £830 Final Cut Studio box set even when combined with some optional add-on utilities. Apple has confirmed to us that the old suite of apps will "no longer be available". It makes professional-grade video editing far more accessible to consumers and semi-pros as an alternative to the more basic Final Cut Express application, which costs £130 -- just £50 less.

ADVERTISEMENT

Apple did the same thing with Aperture 3, its professional photo editing package, which retails in stores for £170, but is available on the Mac App Store for a consumer-friendly £45. This is just another example of Apple transitioning away from its boxed software sales, as the forthcoming OS X release, Lion, will only be available from the Mac App Store when it goes on sale next month.

According to the Mac App Store, Final Cut Pro X is already the "top grossing" app. Let us know if you contributed to this, and leave your thoughts on the software in the comments below. We'll have a review for you very soon once we've had time to get our teeth into it.